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Books I’ve Enjoyed, 4/3/14

Hey, hey, it’s one year since I started this blog. Not yet to 100 posts, but we’ll celebrate anyway.

I’ve been rotten about keeping up with the books I’m reading with my kids over the last month or two, but I’ve had my own little reading boom, so I’m going to share some of the books I’ve enjoyed recently.

Only one of those came from the library (probably part of my problem with our book collection size…), but I enjoyed each of them nonetheless:

I have had this on my nightstand for years now, and I finally decided that it was getting read…and I’m so glad I did. This book has restored my faith in literary fiction. I think the plotting and writing were beautifully done, but the story was enjoyable and gripping, too, and I did not feel like the whole human race was going to hell in a handbasket when I’d finished. Also, librarians are some of the heroes of the book, so you know it has to be pretty good.

The overarching story follows book conservator Hanna Heath as she is given the once-and-a-lifetime of studying and conserving the famous Sarajevo Haggadah in the 1990s, but then each section follows a different character who was part of the book’s previous history. Although Brooks is very upfront that the story and all the characters are fictional, it is based on some of the history of the real Sarajevo Haggadah, which Brooks learned about in her previous work as a journalist.

This was quite a book, and having seen the entire first season and part of the second season of the TV show, I enjoyed seeing where the stories matched and where they differed. I enjoyed Worth’s narration of both stories about her patients and life at Nonnatus House, and I didn’t find her occasional judgements about the people she encountered as bothersome as other readers did, because she was honest about her feelings and about her naiveté at the time, and also fairly self-critical about them. It’s still hard to believe that people were having babies my parents’ age in a fashion that seems like it should be older than my great-grandparents, but it certainly was fascinating.

It’s been awhile since I read the first book in the series, but I enjoyed this installment very much. It was nice that I was already interested in both Deryn and Alek (it took me awhile to get into the alternating points of view with Leviathan), and the story certainly kept up the action. Some of the dilemmas that arise from Deryn pretending to be a boy are pretty funny…especially as the reader realizes (likely more than Deryn herself) just how many people are starting to guess that she’s a girl.

I liked this book in spite of myself. I bought it because it looked interesting (and because I like fairy tale retellings, and didn’t know a whole lot about the Arabian Nights), but when I started it, I felt like the narration was a little too self-conscious, trying a little too hard to create a mystical story aura. Still, the story itself was good enough, and the characters were likable enough, that I was eventually able to forget about the narration and just get lost in the story.

It took me awhile to pick this one up because I knew it took place in a concentration camp. My mom and I have discussed how it was easier to read books about the Holocaust before and, in her case (and hopefully mine, once I get there!), after our kids were young–but I’m still right in the young-kid stage. What strikes me reading this book now was how Rose was not yet okay at the end of the book, even though you know pretty early on that she survives and you get the sense that she will eventually be okay. Also, the fact that her mother doesn’t get to see her afterwards, and may not even know what she’s gone through…as bad as it is, I think I’d want to know what my daughter’s been through.

But all that aside, it’s an excellent book, you can tell Wein has thoroughly done her research, and Rosie and her friends are heroines worth rooting for.